The global internet has become a mass commercial marketplace. The internet offers a wide variety of media such news websites, downloadable music, and video. The internet also offers commercial services such as investment services, banking, and computer services. The internet even provides a convenient means of obtaining physical products through the use of online merchants and auction sites.
Over the past twenty years many very large commercial businesses have been founded, grown, and prospered on the internet. These internet-centric businesses can provide various goods and services to consumers in a very efficient manner since automated systems are used to perform much of the interaction with the consumers. By reducing interactions with humans, internet bases businesses can save extremely large amounts of money on labor costs. For example, internet-based retail stores display available products to consumers, accept product orders from consumers, and accept payment for product orders in a completely automated manner that does not require any human intervention such that the cost of each sales transaction is kept very low. Thus, by using automated transaction systems, it is not uncommon for a commercial internet-based business to provide goods or services to millions of different customers each day.
In order to provide goods or services to millions of different consumers each day, the computer server systems of a large commercial internet-based business must be designed with great care in order to handle the heavy load of traffic. Since there is little concept of distance on the internet, many internet based businesses provide services to various consumers located world-wide. Being a world-wide provider of services on the internet means that there will virtually always be a customer looking for services no matter what time of day it is such that the server systems the provide the services must be available twenty-four hours each day. And as any successful business owner knows, a key to business success is consistency and reliability of service. Thus, large commercial internet-based business must provide fail-safe mechanisms that will keep the server systems of the internet-based business operating despite the failure of any individual component of the server systems.